Testing startups ideas

We came up with a bunch of ideas for ContactOut by studying 100s of companies, talking to industry experts and users.

Here’s a high level overview of some things we learnt:

Problem

Recruiters find it hard to reach candidates and hire them.

Linkedin message have low response rate.

Other prospecting platforms provide work email only

Product

Build a prospecting tool for recruiters that provides personal emails and phone numbers for direct outreach.

Crowd source user data.

Leverage competitor data.

Unique Value Prop

Recruiter prefer personal email for a higher response rate

Sales

Sell via sales team, make sales deck and sales pitch by booking and recording competitor sales calls

Users can afford $2000, since they pay $5000+ for Linkedin.

Marketing

Generate leads via SEO and cold email

The next step is to test and validate our business ideas.

We want to ask ourselves what are the biggest risks on what is the fastest way to test and learn?

A common mistake is to start building the product without validating whether users would buy it.

For example, I spent one year building a time management tool called Focus A Lot.

I built a desktop application for Windows and Mac and I learnt two programming languages.

When I finally launched, I found out that most people don’t want a tracker on the desktop that tracks the productivity and application usage.

They find this invasive.

I could have found this out by conducting user interviews instead of wasting one year building the product.

Google Glass is another example.

Google spends a billion dollars in product development costs only to find out that people don’t want to wear robot glasses that makes them look socially awkward and invades their privacy by recording all their friends.

What you can quickly validate is am I solving a real problem?

For ContactOut, we spoke to dozens of recruiters and learnt that it’s difficult to get in touch with candidates, especially software engineers. Sometimes candidates don’t even show up to interviews.

Talk to users first.

More stories on finding product market fit coming up